State Vetoes Private Center

Instead Will Hike Funding To Existing Correction Services

February 08, 2005|By DWIGHT F. BLINT; Courant Staff Writer

The state has given up on a plan to have a private company run a drug treatment and vocational training facility for female inmates, delighting union officials who had said it would have been a step toward privatization.

Instead of creating ``community justice centers,'' the state will increase funding to internally run alternative-to-incarceration services that already exist within the Department of Correction.

Union officials who represent correction officers have argued that the department did not have to hire a private company.

``We are absolutely thrilled that it remains under our control, and that our skilled people are going to run that pre-release facility,'' said Wayne Meyers, president of AFSCME local 1565. ``It was the beginning of privatization, and I think we can do it better and do it cheaper on a even playing field.''

``The federal funds that would have been used have been re-designated,'' said correction officials in a statement Monday. ``The DOC intents to utilize the building that would have been used for the community justice center as a pre-release facility that the department will operate. That program is being developed currently and it is anticipated opening some time in the spring of 2005.''

The state's decision may have no effect on a plan to build one or more community justice centers for male offenders that would be operated by a private company. Although a request for proposals has been issued for that project, it has not received funding, according to Brian Garnett, director of Communications of the Department of Correction.

The New Jersey-based Education and Health Centers of America, the nonprofit arm of Community Correction Corp., initially won the roughly $2.2 million contract in 2003 to run the women's facility in the Niantic section of East Lyme.

But Attorney General Richard Blumenthal forced correction officials to withdraw the contract after concerns were raised about the company's lobbying efforts.

The company in March 2000 had hired -- at $75,000 a year -- Gaffney, Bennett & Associates, which was headed by Jay Malcynsky, a close adviser to former Gov. John G. Rowland.Then company officials flew influential lawmakers and state officials in a private plane to its facility in Roseland, N.J.

The company's president, John Clancy, also donated $2,000 to Rowland's re-election campaign.

The first $1,500 of the donation was made in January 2001, the same month that former Correction Commissioner John Armstrong, then chairman of the governor's prison and jail overcrowding committee, requested $20 million to create a 500-bed, secured, pre-release treatment center for male offenders in Connecticut. Armstrong's proposal closely mirrored the facility state officials had toured in New Jersey.